Social cleavages and electoral competition in India

Given the great diversity in language, ethnicity, and caste in India, and the resulting millions of possible winning electoral combinations, why is it that in contemporary India we see large state-wide and inter-state political coalitions built around categories such as “Bahujan” or “Backward Caste” instead of thousands of separate caste parties competing at the regional or zila (district) level? This question is the focus of Christophe Jaffrelot's India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in India, Pradeep Chhibber's Democracy without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India, and Anirudh Krishna's Active Social Capital: Tracing the roots of development and democracy. This review assesses how these works address the question of political organization and social cleavages in India, examining the differences in approaches and discussing what still needs to be addressed.     

Political Constitutionalism and the European Union

What kind of constitution is emerging in Europe? There are two approaches to answering this question. The first, a ‘foundational’ approach, rejects the premise: there can be no real constitution in the absence of a ‘demos’, a foundation which exists only nationally. The second, ‘freestanding’ approach, depicts it as paradigmatic of a broader phenomenon of cosmopolitan constitutionalism, based on individual rights guaranteed through a transnational rule of law. Rejecting both for their failure to account for European constitutionalism as a historical process of polity‐building, a third approach, ‘political constitutionalism’, is proposed, capturing the dynamic quality of constitutionalisation in the EU. From this perspective, what is emerging in Europe is a constitution that reflects a common good (predominantly conceived in economic terms), albeit one which is legally, political and socially contested. It is by capturing this complex picture of the political formation of Europe that the constitutional question will be most fruitfully pursued.     

Death Due to Decapitation in Two Motorcyclists: A Description of a Unique Case and a Brief Review of the Literature

Deaths due to decapitation, especially related to traffic accidents, are rarely found in forensic practice. The present case involves a man and a woman who died from decapitation due to an unusual mechanism while they were riding on a motorbike down a mountain road. The autopsy, which was completed as a physics study, allowed the accident to be reconstructed as follows: A plastic cable that had detached from a timber‐transporting machine whipped the road and hit the two motorcyclists. The impact resulted in the complete severing of both riders’ heads. Involving different scientists in this accident investigation was crucial to understanding the dynamics of the accident. In fact, in addition to scene inspection and autopsy, a physics study was carried out on the cable and the clamp involved, which led to an explanation for the abrupt movement of the cable and, thus, to a thorough reconstruction of the accident.     

Quadruple Helix and firms’ performance: an empirical verification in Europe

The emerging relationships connecting organizations are the condition on which innovation is founded nowadays, so it is pivotal to achieve a vaster comprehension of the phenomenon through the exploitation of new dynamics and the exploration of new trajectories. In line with the Quadruple Helix (QE) approach, it seems reasonable to expect that the different environments in which firms operate would highlight the expectations of the various market governance systems, which firms must comply with in order to gain social legitimacy and improve their capacity for survival. To determine whether the Quadruple Helix model has an effect on the firms’ profitability, the authors employed the classification analysis method (Classification And Regression Trees). The sample is composed by 4215 manufacturing firms located in science parks. In our empirical model, the variable “citizen” classifies businesses with high Return On Investment in the best way. This shows that in science parks “the fourth helix” (citizen) has an important role in classifying the firms with the highest performance. Moreover, the majority of firms that attribute high importance to the collaboration with private financial institutions in order to finance innovations have a high ROI. In addition, firms with high economic performance in the model of the quadruple helix generate product innovation.     

Constitutional pluralism: Chronicle of a death foretold?

What remains of the idea of constitutional pluralism in the wake of the Euro‐crisis? According to the new anti‐pluralists, the recent OMT saga signals its demise, calling to an end the tense stalemate between the ECJ and the German Constitutional Court on the question of ultimate authority. With the ECJ's checkmate, OMT represents a new stage in the constitutionalisation of the European Union, towards a fully monist order. Since constitutional pluralism was an inherently unstable and undesirable compromise, that is both inevitable and to be welcomed. It is argued here that this is misguided in attending to the formal at the expense of the material dimension of constitutional development. The material perspective reveals a deeply dysfunctional constitutional dynamic, of which the judicial battle in OMT is merely a surface reflection. This dynamic now reaches a critical conjuncture, encapsulated in the debate over ‘Grexit’, and the material conflict between solidarity and austerity. Constitutional pluralism, in conclusion, may be an idea worth defending, but as a normative plea for the co‐existence of a horizontal plurality of constitutional orders. This requires radical constitutional re‐imagination of the European project.     

Civil Society and the Re-imagination of European Constitutionalism

Abstract: The twin concepts of constitutionalism and democracy, which offer a complex template for the structural organisation of a polity, can be understood in terms of a dialectic of complementary but competing values, values represented by responsiveness to an existing order and innovation towards a potentially new order. Recognising this necessarily dynamic relationship, an essentialist reading of a constitutionalisation of the demos is abandoned, and an examination of the extent to which the dialectic can credibly or legitimately be played out in a supranational ‘community’ and in the context of an emerging transnational civil society can be undertaken. Rather than seeking credibility or legitimacy through the rationalisation of a community by an ethical consensus as in some forms of republicanism and communitarianism, the dialectic opens up the norms and boundaries of the polity and leads to an understanding of the ‘community’ in less rigid and more diffuse, even plural, terms. Once understood in this way the possibility emerges for legitimacy to be pursued through a public sphere enlarged by a context‐transcending constitutional discourse mediated by transnational civil society. Alternatively the normative ‘openness’ of the polity might be prioritised and with it the uncertainty/fluidity of the constitutional arrangement itself; in this way the legitimate pursuit of constitutionalism is understood in terms of a never‐ending agonistic struggle or experimental practice.